Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

The German Lion of Africa

What’s going on with book reviews? Here is the Pulitizer prizewinning (for ‘criticism’) Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, on this book’s cover: Let me say straight out that if all military histories were as thrilling and well written as Robert Gaudi’s African Kaiser, I might give up reading fiction and literary bio-graphy… Gaudi writes with the flair of a latter-day Macaulay. He sets his scenes carefully and describes naval and military action like a novelist. Leaving aside the extraordinary comparison with Macaulay for the moment, most naval and military novels that I’ve read get the historical detail right. Robert Gaudi’s book is so error-strewn that it would fail to

Dominic Green Dominic Green

Wool, wheat and wet weather

Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy scholars of Clan Macfarlane range freely across the hills and lexicons in search of old England, the dying and undead. This paperchase confirms that a change in the self-image of the English is afoot too. For centuries, the English poured into their cities. Now, they are trickling back out to the countryside. London excites precisely because it is another country, from a future that at least 54.8 per cent of the English prefer not to live in. But what does the returnee know of England who only London knows? In

Philip Hensher

A dazzling vision

There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a very strange painter he was. There was an element of theatricality in his working practice — the public would expect to be astonished when they glimpsed it — but, even so, it is difficult to imagine any artist producing anything using Gainsborough’s methods. He painted in semi-darkness, and an observer reported that sitters for portraits found that ‘neither they nor their pictures were scarcely discernible’. The canvas, if large, was hung loosely, ‘secured by small cords’. James Hamilton describes it as ‘rigged perhaps like a small yacht, the canvas bellying

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

Heroines of the Soviet Union

Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to give birth after learning about Auschwitz and Dachau. But as it turned out, she was already pregnant. Anastasia Voropaeva, a corporal and searchlight operator, recalled a pretty Russian girl in liberated territory who had been raped and impregnated by her German ‘boss’ and had hanged herself after victory rather than give birth to a ‘little Fritz’. Albina Gantimurova remembered nearly shooting an adolescent member of the German Volkssturm in Berlin before he burst into tears and took her hand. Svetlana Alexievich finished The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Harry Potter’s 20th anniversary

This summer saw 20 years since the publication of the first Harry Potter novel. Love them or hate them, the adventures of JK Rowling’s boy wizard are now a huge part of the literary landscape. In the wake of a Harry Potter conference organised by the Spectator’s own Nick Hilton, I’m joined for this week’s podcast by Nick and our children’s book reviewer Melanie McDonagh to ask: how good were the books; what, in literary terms, defines their special sort of magic; and what has been their effect on children’s writing in general? You can listen to our conversation here: And if you enjoyed that, do subscribe on iTunes for

John Self

The evil that men do | 3 August 2017

The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There is no possibility of turning page after page engaged in finding out what comes next, of being lost in the characters’ stories. The usual pleasures of fiction are so thoroughly absent that the reader emerges at the other end blinking into the light, struggling to remember what all the fuss about books is anyway. This is apt, perhaps, for a novel about historic suffering and man’s inhumanity to man. The conceit is that an unnamed collector has amassed a hangar-sized museum of war, full of weaponry and the historical accoutrements

Ian Sansom

A choice of first novels | 3 August 2017

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m able to recall, was a poet called Attila the Stockbroker, who we used to go and see perform in Harlow, and who did an excellent Peel session. Whatever the hell happened to Attila the Stockbroker?) Three new debut novels might all properly be acclaimed as representing the voice of their generation — though who knows,

Helen R Brown

Torn between envy and contempt

Arriving at boarding school with the wrong shoes and a teddy bear in his suitcase, the hero of Elizabeth Day’s fourth novel is the latest in a long literary line of suburban lost boys sucked into the intoxicating orbit of a wealthy friend. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Patricia Highsmith, Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst and Gillian Flynn have all done it before and we know the story never ends well. Day drops references to them all into her book, like olives into an increasingly dirty martini. We know from the outset that a crime has been committed. We first meet Martin Gilmour in a police interview room, the day after

Carey Schofield

… and an awesome beak

The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the story of Michael George MacDonald Kidson (MGMK, as he was known), who taught history at Eton from 1965 to 1994 and was an influential tutor to hundreds of boys, often the wayward and the damaged. Jamie Blackett, who was taught by him there, has collected Kidsoniana from former pupils, colleagues, friends and acquaintances. What emerges is a portrait of a colourful maverick who bullied and consoled generations of schoolboys into success and happiness. Blackett conjures up a cheerful world where robust and affectionate Springers (Kidson’s Dougal, Boody, Bertie, Charlie, Jed

Kate Womersley

No pain, no gain

It is an unexpected pleasure when fiction has a soundtrack to accompany the work of reviewing. H(A)PPY is ‘best enjoyed in conjunction with Agustin Barrios: The Complete Historical Guitar Recordings’, Nicola Barker advises before her text gets underway. It’s tempting to dismiss this as a gimmick. But Barrios’s music strikes a deep chord with the rebellion at the heart of Barker’s 12th novel. Born in the 1880s, the Paraguayan’s playing was ridiculed because he preferred his guitar strings to be made of steel rather than fashionable gut. His dissonant art, like Barker’s today, could not be accused of courting admiration. The ‘sad-happiness’ of Barrios’s music is what comes to destabilise

Horatio Clare

Formidable black talons…

I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising — but reading David Cobham’s Bowland Beth: The Story of an English Hen Harrier I felt it again strongly. Your nature writer now has a hungry market, keen and generous publishers and a shelf in the bookshop. But anyone younger than my parents — unless they are very fortunate — has seen only a fraction of the natural richness our islands once held. And despite the sales and acclaim and translation rights, none of them — of us — has even pushed the boundaries laid down by our predecessors in the

Saskia Baron

Some insights into autism

The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a series of answers to the questions that puzzled those around him, Higashida’s lyrical explanations of his compulsions and unusual behaviours were revelatory and uplifting. Readers felt they understood the condition better as a result. Higashida was described as non-verbal; he composed his earlier book by touching letters on a card with an alphabet grid or tracing them on the palm of a hand. The spelled-out words were transcribed and the text edited by his mother. This sequel, Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight, has been edited together from Higashida’s

Clinton Heylin

Pretentious rock on a grand scale

There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so obviously ill-conceived as The Show That Never Ends, which comes complete with hyperbolic blurb from the esteemed novelist Michael Chabon. Yet what David Weigel provides is a masterclass in how not to write non-fiction. To paraphrase The Producers, having picked the wrong writer, the wrong editor, the wrong researcher, where did the publishers go right? The answer, sadly, is nowhere. I say sadly, because for some time there has been an abiding need for a good history of rock’s most reviled ‘aberration’: Prog (short for Pretentious Rock On a Grand

Michael Tanner

The morality of conducting

Now he is the greatest figure for me, in the world. [Toscanini is] the last proud, noble, unbending representative (with Salvemini) of the Risorgimento & 19th-century ideals of human liberty… not just a great conductor but a symbol of discipline and spontaneity in one — the most morally dignified & inspiring hero of our time — more than Einstein, (to me) more than even the superhuman Winston [Churchill]. That is Isaiah Berlin writing in 1952, two years before his hero’s last concert, and as quoted by Harvey Sachs in this magnificent biography. Though Berlin’s encomium is extreme, it isn’t unrepresentative of the kind of things that were being written about

Sunday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: starting over with Hemingway, Joyce, Hardy – and Dan Brown

The latest challenge was to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question. The pitfalls are many as an author approaches the finishing line. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote that because of the need to round things off, ‘nearly all novels are feeble at the end’. He has a point, but some get it just right. Here’s what Robert McCrum has to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anything-but-feeble conclusion to The Great Gatsby (‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’) ‘Somehow,

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Our thoughts on the Man Booker’s longlist

This year’s Man Booker longlist is a good one, I think. Lots of variety; big names and small ones; and an impressive geographical spread. Leans towards the experimental – and no harm in that. I’m pleased/relieved to say that The Spectator reviewed all but three of these books when they came out (Kamila Shamsie is forthcoming) – so I’m posting links here where appropriate. We liked almost all we reviewed, though a minority report was posted on Sebastian Barry and our Caroline Moore was cooler on Arundhati Roy than others have been. Apologies to Mozley, Fridlund and McCormack. It’s a numbers game… 4321 by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber) Days Without

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

A cacophony of complaint

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old and subsequently goes on to eat herself to over 40 stone? Probably the sort of monster who’s never read a book about fatness as a feminist issue which she found convincing. Here we go again: ‘This is what most girls are taught — we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. And most women know this — that we are supposed to disappear.’ This ignores the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past — when women had no rights whatsoever —

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is

Adam Nicolson

Spirits from the vasty deep…

‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays called The Sea Inside and now RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR together make a loose, meditative trilogy on people, the ocean, its inhabitants, its threats and delights, the comings and goings, the whole tidal business, its excitements and its ever-present grip on our minds and imaginations. The sea ‘deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike’, he says, and that all-pervasiveness is both his subject and his method. The rather exciting slidtogether words of this title (and of all his chapter titles) give a hint of what the book is about. This is

Emily Rhodes

The dark side of creativity

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a film in the 1960s — champagne, drugs, threesomes, gangsters, a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, hula-hooping girls and Pucci scarves flung over smears of vomit. Underneath, however, lies an intellectual question. The film is an adaptation of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, a story about obsessively trying to understand the secret key that unlocks an author’s work: ‘The idea that governs the whole and gives it meaning… a string that my pearls were strung on.’ (Ought I admit that I enjoyed Quinn’s saucy 1960s screenplay, spliced between chapters of the